NARCOS, Seasons One and Two (Madman DVD/BluRay)

Just how good is Narcos,
this television series about the life and times and murderous regime
of the Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar?

Consider this: Recently we
were in Stockholm in an air b'n'b and the absent owner had Narcos on
his Netflix.

One morning I turned on
episode one and for the following two weeks would start the day with
an episode or two before hitting the streets.

Okay, any number of
mini-series can grab you (recently we found Vikings impossible to
walk away from and would watch two and three episodes in a sitting)
but here's the thing about Narcos in Stockholm.

At a guess 75% of the
dialogue was in Spanish but the subtitles were, of course, in
Swedish. And although I understand neither language Narcos had me
hooked.

The filming is
exceptional, the menace quite palpable, the facial expressions (and
sometimes lack of them) allowed me to follow the personal dynamics,
Wagner Moura who plays Escobar is utterly persuasive and the cast of
surrounding characters as compelling as those in The Sopranos.

It is about drugs, money,
politics, killing, locations in the jungle, cities and expensive
well-guarded fortress homes dripping in luxury and glitz . . .

Any series which can hook
you in when you barely understand a word has a lot going for it.

The third season of this utterly addictive (hmmm) series has just started on Netflix but if -- like me -- you don't have/do that, then let's bring you up to speed. Or more correctly, coke.

This is about drugs, the market economy and so much more.

And for me ....

With the BluRay
release of the first two series – it looks even better than it did
in Stockholm – I can get all the nuances of the plot which were
previously arcane to me.

It is a play-and-pause to
take in the locations: beautiful landscapes, gritty backstreets,
extravagant opulence and, yes, sometimes even the graphic violence.

William Burroughs always
argued there was no point in cutting off the head of snake in the
drug trade – the top people in the cartels – because there will
always be those lower down who will want to replace them.

It's business, capitalism,
greed and ambition all bound together by a culture of violence and
intimidation. But it's also about supply and demand . . . and who
controls the flow each way.

Some of that thinking was
applied to Escobar also as government officials felt it better to
have him there and control him than try to take him out. Bad
politics.

As we have seen all too
often – and are seeing now in the United States – some people are
as uncontrollable as they ambitious and ruthless.

Pablo Escobar was one of
those. The more he had the more he wanted, and with so many Americans
shoving coke up their noses during the period this series covers –
the decadent Eighties mostly – the demand was high.

Escobar and his cartels
were making more money than they could spend or invest.

But Escobar wasn't some
bat-shit crazy figure like Al Pacino in Scarface. He was more like
the cool-headed Pacino in The Godfather. He ran the numbers but read
the signs. He even stood for pubic office and won, so did good work
in the poorer districts where he was very popular because he provided
football fields and jobs, and protected his loyal people.

And there were plenty of
them working away making cocaine in quantities which seem
unimaginable.

The numbers are
astonishing: He was one of the richest men in the world – and by
far the richest criminal – at the peak in the early Nineties with a
fortune estimated in the tens of billions.

He started small and the
Narcos series begins where he did, as a petty criminal (car thief,
selling contraband) and graduated – as Burroughs says people do in
the trade – to selling coke then opening up the links to the US via
Venezuala.

Within a decade from the mid
Seventies he had built a network of manufacture and distribution
which was seeing something like 9o tons of a the white powder – in
al kinds of increasingly elaborate guises – being exported to the
US, mostly through Florida.

Narcos keeps two
narratives running parallel: that of Escobar and his life, and that
of two US narcotics officers who work in and out Columbia.

We see two sides of the
story as well as the politics of the Reagan era (the war on drugs
rhetoric) and of Columbia where Escobar's Medellin Cartel thought
nothing of assassinating cops, journalists, judges, politicians and
civic officials if it seemed necessary.

Alongside the lightly
fictionalised account are intercut news footage from the era and it
is remarkable to see actual film the left-wing guerrillas lay siege
to the Columbian Supreme Court in '85 – supported by Escobar –
which was ostensibly in retaliation for the government changing
extradition legislation. But it also allowed them to take over the
building and destroy documents which incriminated cartel members
(Escobar among them) and seen them shipped off to the US for trial.

It was a war.

It was a war on the war on
drugs.

If you haven't seen
Narcos, the first two series are available now and they are utterly
gripping.

On the face of it, there would seem little common ground between
European free jazz and the traditional music and Buddhist culture of Java. But
for Aucklander Winston Marsh -- co-producer of... > Read more

Not to be confused with Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven -- or the excellent if short-lived outlaw-rock band of the same name -- The Unforgiven from 1960 is one of John Huston's ambitious Westerns, cast... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

You can’t help notice that the skin of Buenos Aires is heavily tattooed: not just with graffiti, but by large and vivid murals, and spray-on stencil art. You can spend a lot of time looking... > Read more

Because they are often offered the temptations of the flesh, musicians will inevitably write and sing about it. There are a lot of songs about sex, some of them rather coded.
There's also a... > Read more